Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini was yesterday to gather Europe’s disparate nationalists for a rally in Milan, seeking to forge a united front ahead of European elections. The rally was to see leaders of 12 far-right parties marching toward their hoped-for conquest of Brussels after next week’s European parliamentary elections.
Headliners Salvini of Italy’s anti-immigrant League Party and Marine Le Pen of France’s Islamophobic National Rally hope their Europe of Nations and Freedom group would become the third-largest in Brussels.
However, despite their shared dislike of immigration, multiculturalism, the left and the EU, Europe’s populists remain divided on many other key issues, including budgetary discipline, migrant distribution and relations with Moscow.
Most of Europe’s right-wing nationalists are divided into three blocs and a tangled web of alliances in the European Parliament, which Salvini and Le Pen would like to overhaul, if not destroy.
The Europe of Nations and Freedom includes Austria’s Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, whose head Geert Wilders was in Milan.
Thousands of League supporters were to march toward Milan’s Duomo square where leaders were to give afternoon speeches.
Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party and Poland’s governing PiS, or Law and Justice Party, were to be absent from the rally.
Orban has voiced admiration for Salvini and promised “cooperation” after the vote, but refuses any alliance with Le Pen.
Smaller parties such as Bulgaria’s Volya or Slovakia’s Sme Rodina, which is set to win a single seat in the European Parliament, were to join the Milan rally, held alongside a large anti-fascist demonstration.
“Give us a hand to become the top European party, to take back the keys to our home,” Salvini, who has been frantically campaigning across Italy, told a rally. “The European elections are a referendum between life and death, between the past and the future, a free Europe and an Islamic state based on fear.”
Salvini might win seats in the European elections on Thursday to Saturday next week, but his dream of uniting nationalist parties was “unrealizable,” Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper said on Friday.
While Salvini and Le Pen have close ties to Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin, eastern European far-right parties are wary of Moscow’s ambitions.
Critics have said that an enduring alliance between the League and Germany’s Alternative for Germany, which was to be in Milan, would be impossible.
“Salvini for instance wants a European redistribution of refugees, [lead candidate Joerg] Meuthen doesn’t want a single refugee. What’s more, Meuthen doesn’t want to give a single cent to southern Europe,” leading German Green Party member Sven Giegold told Italy’s AGI news agency.
Salvini hopes that the future right-wing bloc would be able to implement laxer EU budget rules, a boon for Italy’s struggling economy.
“I think that the new figures in the European Parliament and the new balance in the Commission will allow the rules that are strangling the economy to be changed,” Salvini said on Friday.
Salvini’s coalition relationship with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement of Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio is increasingly fraught since they formed a government in June last year.
Opinion polls predict that the number of European Parliament seats would go from six to 26 for the League, from 15 seats to 20 for the National Rally and from one seat to 11 for the Alternative for Germany.
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